Service integrators = Ed Tech bargain hunters?

I'm not entirely enamored of my ISP right now. Their backbone is dated, downtime too frequent, the email interface they provide is kludgy at best, application support for their web hosting is more limited than what you can get from $1.99 a month hosts, and, well, I'm just not impressed.

Yesterday, though, I met with a services integrator. She's in sales, so no doubt she paints a rosy picture. However, one piece of her presentation that was most impressive was their willingness to seek out the optimal solutions in a given area and negotiate with providers to garner top deals for the right Internet access solution. Some of her clients, for example, have been able to achieve superior bandwidth as well as redundancy by coupling a cable line with a T1 coming into their building. This obviously isn't something that you can achieve by contracting with a single ISP.

Similarly, instead of locking into a single set of solutions (e.g., email, web hosting, Internet service, etc.) as you might with an ISP, a services integrator can do just that: integrate services from a variety of vendors. While you end up paying for this integration, you might also save money and achieve a better suite of products by leveraging their relationships with multiple vendors.

I have a meeting with another integrator next week as well as a meeting with Verizon to see what they can offer. I'll keep you posted on what we choose, but it's certainly nice to look at a wide range of solutions to solve the complex problems we face, hopefully in the most cost-effective way possible.

Talk back below about your experiences with contractors along these lines? Have you been better off working directly with telcos? ISPs? Service integrators? Let us know.